There’s an old saying, attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche, that goes something like, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” There’s an older and more famous saying, “Thou shall not kill.” These two different takes on adversity are, of course, not really contradictory. The quote from Nietzsche advises us to raise our threshold for pain because, after all, shit happens. “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering,” the 19th century philosopher also said. Or maybe it was Maya Angelou. Or Oprah Winfrey. None of these self-help gurus would go on to say that we should help those around us get stronger and find meaning in life by inflicting pain on them. That’s where the universal golden rule comes in, that whatever we wouldn’t want for ourselves – including near-death experiences – we shouldn’t do to others. I got thinking about this as I read ab...